Comments | krpalmer: On Carl Sagan Day

krpalmer

On Carl Sagan Day

Nov 09, 2010 17:55

It was pointed out that today could be called "Carl Sagan Day," it being the anniversary of his birth, and that got me thinking. Unlike many of the other people offering their own comments, I didn't see his TV series "Cosmos" at the beginning of the 1980s (to this date, I've only seen one of its episodes, borrowed on videocassette from the local ( Read more... )

space, science

Comments 4

may_child November 10 2010, 03:36:11 UTC

I have "Cosmos" on DVD, and before that, on VHS. (I gave the VHS set to my mom after I got the DVDs.) Back when "Cosmos" first aired on PBS, I was 8 or so, and we had "'Cosmos' Nights" at our house...meaning my mom, my sister, and I would watch that week's episode. I even have some memories of "'Cosmos' Nights," though of course at the time I was too young to understand much of what was being presented. Nonetheless, the series wormed its way into my psyche. When I was 20 or so, I spotted the VHS set on sale, and though I could only afford to buy one or two cassettes at a time, I was thrilled ( ... )

krpalmer November 10 2010, 16:45:24 UTC

When I was collecting my thoughts for this post, I remembered you posting a quote from the series, and went looking a few Novembers back to see if your post had been on a 9th of November... In any case, you may take some small interest in this bit of art.

may_child November 11 2010, 00:42:00 UTC

Hehe! That fan art is a scream. Sagan himself probably would have liked it...I don't know if he was a SW fan per se, but in "The Demon-Haunted World," the book he co-wrote with his wife Ann Druyan, he mentioned the famous misuse of "parsec" as a unit of time, rather than a unit of distance, but then he said that the film was "in many other ways exemplary."

krpalmer November 11 2010, 23:27:42 UTC

I'm sure there's a continuum between "people like us" and "those who have no (positive) interest in Star Wars whatsoever," so I suppose we can at least hope Sagan would understand the reference and appreciate it. I know Isaac Asimov also pointed out the "parsec misuse," but that does bring to mind how there are two different yet "official" explanations, George Lucas saying in the DVD commentary Han was referring to "clever navigation" and printed transcripts claiming he was trying to impress Ben Kenobi with "obvious misinformation"... although, of course, that's more something "people like us" would know about in the first place.